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An anonymous reader writes "An Argentinian politician who introduced a law to send plagiarists to jail for three to eight years appears to have plagiarized the explanation of his bill directly from Wikipedia. The bulk of his explanation is three paragraphs that are taken, verbatim, from Wikipedia, without acknowledgment."

From TFA: Just to make sure someone didn't do the opposite and take the text of the introduction and make it the Wikipedia page, I looked, and as I'm typing this, the Wikipedia page hasn't been updated since April -- and it looks like the bulk of that page has actually been in place for quite some time. The bill was introduced on May 6th.

From Wikipedia's Terms of Use:
"Wikimedia projects are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, as long as the use is attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works."

If he didn't cite Wikipedia (snicker) then he's at least violated their Terms of Use specifying a "Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0".. which I assume would be a copyright violation. But, IANAL.

I live in Argentina and have read the original proposal. In fact he's proposing to up the penalties for misrepresenting, selling fake property as the original or selling property without that you don't own. Basically, you could sell fake goods, but you'd have to state it, thus, you'll be infringing on copyright. It's not so much about plagiarism as about misrepresentation and selling of fake goods as originals.Having said that, I still think what he did was despicable and I seriously doubt his wits to be a representative. But which country is proud of its politicians? I would seriously consider moving there!

No she did NOT... bloody hell... everybody stops reading after the first definition.

Irony has THREE definitions in any decent dictionary.The third one dates right back to ancient greek tragic theater. It's the case where despite all human endeavour a good person nevertheless gets fucked over at the whim of the gods. And the name for that is IRONY. Drop the greek religious bit (which is acceptable ever since we STOPPED living in ancient greeks) and voila, you have tragic irony.Every single line of that song is a perfect example of that type of Irony.

Yes indeed, when it comes right down to it "shit out of luck" IS one of the valid meanings of the word "ironic".When you throw in that these were SONG lyrics - that means she had poetic freedom, and tragic irony coming out of theater is a clear case of poetry (the line is not as wide as we think - remember Aristotle's groundbreaking paper on theater was called 'the poetics' - and that third meaning was FIRST defined in that same paper).

That's the really ironic bit... the meaning of "irony" that smart-ass geeks always complain about is the oldest and MOST accurate use of the word ! (Can you guess which of the three meanings I'm of irony I used there ?)

So what do you call it when smart-assedness turns into a mass-advertisement of your ignorance ?